How to Think About Civilizations - The Watson Institute for ...

closely at the internal debates and conversations among self-identified members of a
civilization about what their civilization entails, and concentrates on the nuances of
those conversations as well as their contentious character. This suggests that
Huntingtonian essentialism might itself be composed of the conjoining of two
analytically distinct commitments—commitments that could be accepted or rejected
individually as well as jointly. And that, in turn, suggests a simple categorization of
ways of studying civilizations, a categorization animated by two analytical distinctions:
one involving a turn from static civilizational attributes to dynamic civilizational
processes, and one involving a turn from the identification of a civilization’s key features
by scholars to an identification of a civilization’s key features by the participants in that
civilization.
I will discuss each of these distinctions in turn, before assembling them into a
coherent matrix of scholarly positions. 2
Attributes versus Processes
The distinction between attributes and processes is a well-established feature of
discussions within scientific ontology. By “scientific ontology” I mean the catalog of
2 I would be remiss if I did not also admit that these distinctions stem, in part, from my own scholarly work and the
value-commitments that drive it. Perhaps someone else looking at the same academic conversation about civilizations
would extract alternative axes along which to compare and contrast positions taken up by various participants in that
conversation. They are of course welcome to do so, but I’m not going to get into the endless exercise of trying to
anticipate all possible ways of dividing up the conversation—nor am I going to try to offer any transcendental grounding
for the two analytical distinctions that I am proposing. As fascinating as that can be—see (Onuf 1989) for a sustained
example—my tastes run more to allowing an ideal-typical matrix to demonstrate its worth on pragmatic grounds.
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 9